In the kitchen, Gilberto didn’t need black coffee or caffeine tablets or lively music to stay awake. In the chair directly across the dinette table from him, Booth Hendrickson was the perfect cure for drowsiness.
Jane had ordered the man to sleep, and he slept, but his sleep was dream-riddled and never restful. Behind his pale lids, his eyes moved ceaselessly, fixing on whatever sights in some dark nightmare kingdom. His face was not slack, but enlivened by expressions ranging from perplexion to abhorrence to revulsion.
When he wasn’t grinding his teeth or chewing his lips, he made soft pathetic sounds or talked in his sleep, his voice haunting the kitchen as if it issued from another dimension.
“Hands and hands and more hands, a thousand hands…”
Because he was restrained by zip-ties linking his ankles to the stretcher bar between the back legs of his chair, his hands remained free. As he spoke, they crawled upon the table, nervous, uncertain, this way and that, as if he were seeking something that he feared finding.
“Don’t make me, don’t make me, don’t make me,” he pleaded in a whisper.
His respiration grew ragged and then panicky as he gasped for breath and exhaled in gusts, making thin sounds of desperation, as if some creature born of Hell pursued him. It seemed that he must wake himself, but each time the panic subsided and still he slept, sliding into a less urgent state of anxiety.
From time to time, he returned to the subject of eyes. “Their eyes…their eyes…” And later: “What’s that in their eyes? Do you see? Do you see what’s in their eyes?”
Although Gilberto didn’t need caffeine, he wanted something to settle his stomach. The Scotch he’d drunk had soured in his gut, and acid refluxed on him. He brought a glass of cold milk to the table and used it to chase a tablet of Pepcid AC before he sat down again.
“Don’t leave me in the dark,” Hendrickson pleaded in an urgent and despairing whisper. “No way is the way you think it is, there’s no out, only in.”
For a few minutes the man was silent, though his face appeared no less tortured.
Abruptly he opened his eyes and sat forward in his chair and seemed to look at Gilberto as he whispered, “Heads inside heads, eyes inside eyes, they’re coming now, I know they’re coming, no way to keep them out of my eyes, out of my head. They’re coming.”
“What can I do for you?” Gilberto asked. “Can I help you somehow?”
But maybe Hendrickson didn’t see him after all, hadn’t been speaking to him, and was still asleep even when his eyes were open. He closed them and settled back in his chair and grew quiet again.
Gilberto doubted that the milk and acid reducer were going to work.